Three enjoyable ways to slow your brain's ageing

Our brains thrive on a challenge, but it doesn't all have to be hard work to see the health benefits. Here are three simple and fun ways to protect your brain as you age.

If presented with an easy task or a hard one, which would you take? Chances are we'd all pick the easy task, for good reason. Taking mental shortcuts is built into our biology in order to conserve our energy.

Technology has only enhanced our ability to do so. It's therefore tempting to take shortcuts and complete tasks with the least friction possible. However, if that results in reduced mental effort it could be harming our lifespan and overall health.

Our "healthy lifespan" – the number of years people spend in good health – is declining in many parts of the world. As people live longer, the number of years they live in ill health tends to increase, researchers note.

When it comes to the brain, there are things we can do to promote a longer healthy lifespan. Essentially, if we take part in challenging activities, we are building up what's known as "cognitive reserve" – which has a protective effect on the brain.

There are numerous ways to do so as part of everyday life. "Whatever age we are, there are things that we can do more or less of that might give our thinking skills a bit of a boost," says psychologist Alan Gow from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland.

And the good news is – as I cover in my newsletter course Live Well For Longer – we don't need to radically overhaul our day-to-day life, but can make small, incremental changes across physical, social and mental domains to protect our brains. Here are three of the most enjoyable to start off with.

1. Spatial navigation

One strategy to protect against age-related cognitive decline is to target a specific part of the brain. The brain area important for spatial navigation, the hippocampus, is believed to be the first part of the brain affected in Alzheimer's disease, several years before symptoms start to show.

"For years we've known that people with Alzheimer's often get lost as an initial symptom," says neurologist Dennis Chan from University College London, UK, who specialises in early Alzheimer's detection. And early detection is crucial, he says. "The earlier we identify [cognitive impairments] the faster we can do something about it."

Protecting this brain area could therefore help prevent or delay symptoms. For instance, studies show that ambulance and taxi drivers have among the lowest rates of Alzheimer's-related mortality compared with other roles, precisely because these drivers had been using their brain more for "spatial processing", the researchers propose. It's also long been known that taxi drivers who had spent years learning the city's streets without the use of a map, have an enlarged hippocampus.

Similarly, one study of healthy men who performed a spatial navigation task for four months showed improved navigational skills and no loss of hippocampal volume, whereas the control participants (those who did not perform the task) did experience expected age-related shrinkage.

It's unclear whether enhancing this part of the brain could prevent dementia, but building extra cognitive reserve could offer........

© BBC